dual-boot Win7/Linux software RAID

I have a system that's dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux (Debian/Jessie not that it matters). I want to use software RAID. Converting a BTRFS root filesystem to RAID-1 is trivial and I'm not too bothered about RAID for the boot loader (happy to rely on backups for that). When running Windows 7 I try to convert disk0 to a "dynamic disk" and the "Virtual Disk Manager" says "The selected GPT formatted disk contains a partition which is not of type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID', and is both preceeded and followed by a partition of type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID'.". Now the disk in question has MBR format (verified from Linux fdisk) and the option to convert to GPT is grayed out (so I couldn't make it GPT if I wanted to). Is this problem related to having Linux partitions on the disk with Windows 7? When offering to convert to a dynamic disk Windows said that it would make all partitions other than the current boot partition unbootable, so obviously this wasn't well designed for boot options. http://tinyurl.com/l49zt23 The above URL has the MS Technet article about dynamic disks. It seems to be a combination of LVM and software RAID which wants to control the disks. Is it possible to have Linux use disks that have the windows "dynamic disks" format or do I need to get separate disks? If I got 3 disks (RAID-1 for Windows and a single disk for Linux) how would I get it to boot? A quick Google suggests that GRUB can't deal with dynamic disks, but if I have GRUB on a separate disk can it chain to a Windows boot loader? It seems that the BIOS (HP SFF desktop PC) doesn't support selecting from multiple hard drives to boot so I guess GRUB would have to be on the first disk. Can Windows 7 support being chain-loaded if it's not on SATA disk 0? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
participants (1)
-
Russell Coker